This editorial (below) includes two footnotes. Click on the superscripted
number preceding each footnote to navigate to the locations in the text.

1 Derived from άρχή,
a first principle, a rule, government, and α privative,
meaning not. [p579]

2 It is generally expected that Congress
will pass a bill for the protection of the lives of our Presidents and
other high officials. No doubt the step is justified. But would it not
be proper to extend the same protection to all people. If the murderer’s
intent has been proved by a deed beyond the shadow of a doubt and the
victim has escaped only by good luck or by the skill of physicians,
the law should, under aggravating circumstance, empower the judge or
jury to treat the assailant as a murderer. There are cases in which
the victim of an attempted murder becomes a cripple for life and leads
a miserable existence ever afterwards, while the assailant escapes with
a comparatively light punishment. Humane laws are a blessing, but leniency
toward and a consideration of the interests of the criminal should not
be bought by a withdrawal of the protection to law-abiding citizens.
[p581]

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Anarchism

ANARCHY means lawlessness,¹ and anarchism is the theory that
there ought to be no laws, no government, no ruler. Now, in the original sense
of the word, the tendency of the American political ideal is anarchistic, for
liberty and independence are the keynotes of our history. The underlying principle
of our political institutions is that the men to whom the public affairs of
both the several States and the United States are handed over, are not the rulers
but the servants of the nation. Properly speaking, we have no government but
an administration. The president of the United States is not a sovereign, and
the citizens are not his subjects, but he is the chosen leader, the primus
inter pares, entrusted to attend to certain duties which are in the interest
of all but can in their very nature be performed only by one person.
The people of the United States never found fault
with anarchism so long as anarchists merely expounded their theories, and we
must state here that there are quite a number of avowed anarchists who are opposed
to law on account of the compulsion to obedience which the idea of law
implies, and are therefore consistently opposed to all violence as a matter
of principle. These anarchists, the peaceful anarchists so called, long ago
gained a hearing and preached their doctrines to limited audiences. They were,
however, ridiculed by some of their own friends as milksops and sissies, and
the word anarchism, as commonly understood, accordingly denotes with the large
masses of the people a defiance of the law by assassination and destruction.
The American people are very patient and are always
inclined to allow every theory to be put into practice to show the results to
which it leads. Anarchism cannot complain of not having had a [579][580]
fair trial. The anarchist papers were not suppressed, and anarchist speeches
were tolerated. But now that violent anarchism exhibits dangerous consequences,
the people become indignant and feel like stamping it out as a nefarious weed
that threatens to choke the harvest of good citizenship.
But if we love liberty and abhor government, why
are we not all anarchists and why do we believe in law? The old conception of
law is the view that law is the ukase of the government and serves to maintain
the machinery that keeps the people in subjection. What, then, is the American
conception of law where the term government has ceased to mean sovereignty over
the people and has actually become the administration of public affairs? How
can law, which inevitably means compulsion, be united with liberty?
Kant said that the principle of ethics consists
in laying down maxims of conduct, and all those sentiments or motives to action
are moral which can be made universal maxims. Now as to liberty, we mean to
assert our own liberty and, as a matter of moral consistency, respect the love
of liberty in others. For the sake of maintaining liberty as a general principle
we deem it wrong to trespass upon the rights of others and recognise the necessity
of self-restriction. If all men were truly honest, well-intentioned, and moral,
there would be no need of enforcing self-restriction by law, because every one
would as a matter of course refrain from wronging his fellow beings, and the
truth is that the higher a civilisation the more lenient the laws can be. Progress
implies a wider scope for individual liberty and a relaxation of legal coercions.
American civilisation has actually reached the point where law has ceased to
imply the idea of suppression and indicates the order which for the sake
of preserving our liberty must be maintained. Our laws are not imposed upon
us by rulers but are established by the legally chosen representatives of the
people. Law in this sense is nothing but Kant’s principle of morality applied
to the domain of social life. Law empowers the authorities of the administration
to employ force against those who do not possess sufficient self-control to
abstain from trespassing upon the rights of others.
It is true that there are laws which are neither
wise nor just, and frequently there are men in authority who are unworthy of
their trust and abuse their office for personal gain. But we ought to be wise
enough to remember that the world is nowhere perfect, and that we can improve
conditions only by constant vigilance and by the repeated endeavor to correct
our mistakes. There are [580][581] hours in which
we feel desperate about the slowness of progress; but we should not lose patience.
Eppur si muove! Liberty has been increasing slowly but constantly and
its progress would be quicker but for its false friends who identify liberty
with lawlessness.
The world would gladly accept the gospel of freedom
were it not for the skeleton in the closet, the grinning sham freedom of violent
anarchism, with its gospel of hatred, its bloody deeds of darkness, its contemptible
treachery, its narrow-minded and stupid logic, and its insanity-begotten aspirations.
Anarchism (i. e., the violent anarchism that would
sanction assassination) is as erroneous as it is immoral. Its doctrines can
never become universal maxims. The anarchist’s notion of liberty is license,
his ideal of progress is the destruction and ruin of his betters, his propaganda
consists in preaching hatred and spreading terrorism, the methods he commends
are felony and murder. Should his ideas gain a foothold in the minds of our
people it would not lead us onward to a higher civilisation but back to barbarism,
to a state of society in which the hand of every one is against that of every
other and war is the general rule.
Happily we need not be afraid of anarchism, but
though we must deeply deplore the erratic deed of a criminally insane individual
who figures as an exponent of this dangerous doctrine, there is no need of being
alarmed or resorting to means of repression that would make the remedy worse
than the evil.²